


Making a Friend of It

by ryanthepowerbottomguy



Series: Ticket to Hell [2]
Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Fake AH Crew, GTA AU, Gen, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-25
Updated: 2015-02-25
Packaged: 2018-03-15 06:25:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3436868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryanthepowerbottomguy/pseuds/ryanthepowerbottomguy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ryan starts off the night robbing the place, and ends it with a job offer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Making a Friend of It

Ryan took a chance and leaned against the wall of the building to light up, eyeing the apartment building across the street. He exhaled smoke that haloed around him in the dim light. The apartment building looked as run-down as the rest of the street, but Ryan knew better. At least one of those apartments had a security system and, presumably, lots of pretty valuables behind it. The risk was well worth whatever the reward would be. Ryan had been casing the woman who lived there—alone—for the better part of the last month, and tonight was the night. He had seen her leave the building earlier like clockwork. Every Friday night the woman left her place and didn’t return until near noon on Sunday. Ryan would be long gone by then, though.

He carefully stubbed out the cigarette butt on the wall and placed it back in the pack before pulling up his bandana over his mouth and nose and heading across the street.

The woman’s apartment was on the third floor, right along the fire escape. It was rusty and groaned under Ryan’s weight, but he moved quickly and knew that any other residents of the building would ignore the noise. You didn’t live long in Los Santos before you learned to ignore weird noises.

Soon enough he found himself at the right window—he had checked, he was sure—and set about to wedging open the window. It was an old affair, and the pane came out of its setting easily. No alarm sounded, which meant it was a silent one. It also could have meant that the woman had forgotten to set it before she left, but he didn’t entertain the thought that he could be that lucky.

He began to step inside before he noticed a thin, almost invisible line of wire lying against the windowsill. Clever, that. He dismantled the trap as quickly as he could, not thinking about why the woman would have such a trap—after all, this _was_ Los Santos. He crept inside, noting the nice TV and game system in the bedroom, glancing in the door of the bathroom as he went by. Nice place. The alarm system was by the front door, and within a minute—much less than the time it would take for the system to alert the police—he had disabled it. It was a sophisticated system, but not the hardest thing Ryan had ever hacked.

Something cold and metal pressed against the back of his neck, and he froze.

“Good job,” a voice purred.

“This isn’t what it looks like.” Ryan brought his hands up slowly as to not spook her. How had she gotten back without him seeing her? He was more careful than this. He was _better_ than this.

“It looks like you were planning on robbing me blind,” she said, gun digging into the skin of his neck. His breath caught in his throat, and he closed his eyes. He knew what happened to burglars when they got caught in this city.

“Turn around and take the bandana off,” she said then, stepping away a few inches. “I want to see the guy who managed to disable my security.”

Ryan took a deep breath, and then another, and complied. He was still alive, and maybe if he listened to her he would stay that way for a little while longer.

He had seen the woman from across the street when he had been casing the place, but never this close. She looked about his age and was tall—taller than him, and he wondered if she was wearing heels but didn’t want to look down to see—with broad shoulders and bright red hair and sharp features. She was intimidating as hell this close up.

Behind him the door unlocked and opened, and he braced himself for the worst.

“You haven’t taken care of him yet?” the newcomer asked. “Jack, c’mon, I wanna play Call of Duty.”

“He took longer than I expected disabling the tripwire,” the woman—Jack, apparently—said.

“He managed to disarm that?” the man said, sounding a little impressed. Ryan couldn’t help but feel smug. He’d disarmed the hell out of it.

“Put the gun down, Jack,” the man said. “I think I want to have a chat with our little intruder.” He walked around Ryan and headed for the living room without a glance behind him.

Jack flicked on the safety but didn’t put the gun away. “You heard the boss,” she said, gesturing toward the couch with the barrel.

Ryan sat down cautiously on the couch opposite the other man—the boss, Jack had called him, and that sent shivers along his spine. What had he managed to get himself into?

The man was youngish, likely a few years older than Jack and Ryan himself. There were tattoos covering the skin of the man’s arms up into where they disappeared into his sleeves, and he had the kind of stubble that meant he hadn’t shaved in days, and he smelled like alcohol. If it weren’t for the way he was staring at Ryan, he wouldn’t be intimidating at all.

“So what’s your story?” the man asked. “Down on your luck? Hoping to make it big? Steal a little here, thieve a little there until you’ve made it?”

Ryan had not been expecting this. “I… It pays the bills,” he said. It was his go-to answer, not that anybody had ever asked him that before. Not that he had ever got caught and let his would-be victims interrogate him.

The man hummed. “Let’s say someone offered you a job that paid the bills and _didn’t_ involve robbing apartments,” he said.

“No, don’t,” Jack said, but she sounded resigned.

“It would have to depend on the job,” Ryan said, his brow furrowing in confusion. “And the someone offering.”

“Geoff Ramsey is offering,” the man said. “Your skill with technology would be an asset for my crew.”

This was not how Ryan had expected his night to go. “Your crew,” he said skeptically.

“Yeah,” Ramsey said, smiling suddenly, like he hadn’t heard the doubt in Ryan’s voice. “Me and Jack here. Might have heard of us? We’re the Fake AH Crew.”

The name rang a faint bell. “You’ve pulled off a few convenience store robberies,” Ryan said. He wasn’t interested in that kind of job. Honestly, it was below him. Any idiot could wave a gun at a scared cashier and make off with seven hundred bucks. It took skill to rob a house and get away with it. He continued, “Also, I don’t think you can have a two-person crew.”

“We’ll have three if you take me up on my offer,” Ramsey pointed out like Ryan’s acceptance was assured.

“You don’t even know my name,” Ryan said cautiously. And they weren’t going to find out. There wasn’t any kind of honor among thieves, even ones that robbed convenience stores and called a two-person operation a crew.

“Minor details,” Ramsey said with an unconcerned hand-wave. “So? You going to be joining us?”

Ryan wondered how he was going to say _fuck no_ to Ramsey without getting a bullet in the skull. “I don’t think so,” he said carefully. “Not right now, at least.”

Ramsey reached inside his jacket, and Ryan winced. He just hoped his brains would be hard to clean out of the upholstery. Then Ramsey was holding out a business card.

“Call me up later, then,” Ramsey said. “You know where I am.”

Ryan took the card and pocketed it without glancing at it. He stood up from the couch and pulled his bandana back up before heading toward the front door.

“And buddy?” Ramsey said as Ryan’s hand touched the doorknob. His voice was like a shot of liquid nitrogen to Ryan’s blood. “If you ever try to rob from me again, death will be too good for you.”

Later, when Ryan got back to his shithole of an apartment, he finally pulled Ramsey’s business card out of his jacket pocket. _Ramsey_ , it read in stupidly elaborate script on one side, with a phone number underneath.

\--

It was weeks later that Ryan finally decided to call the number on the card. He made the decision while wrapping his left ankle, which was sure he had sprained—if not worse—while making a getaway from a house perched precariously on the side of a hill. It had been a good take, but the feeling when his ankle had given out from beneath him—the momentary panic when he thought he was about to tumble down the goddamn hill—had sobered him. Made him realize that if something had gone wrong, he had no one to get him out. This time it had been his own head misjudging the space between balcony and ground, but what if next time it was some asshole with a gun? He had been lucky that he had been able to drive himself out of there this time.

So he called the number. The line rang once, twice, and Ryan was about to say fuck it and hang up when it picked up.

“What can I do ya for?” Ramsey’s voice asked, sounding unconcerned and vaguely bored.

“It’s”—Ryan realized he had never given Ramsey any sort of name—“it’s that asshole who broke into your apartment a while back.”

“Oh hey, buddy,” Ramsey said. His voice picked up, became sharper. “You reconsidered my offer?”

Ryan rubbed at the back of his neck. “Yeah, I think I have.”

\--

“What did you say your name was again?” Geoff asked as soon as he saw Ryan.

The three of them were meeting at a neutral place—or, as neutral as you could get in Los Santos. It was a nice little coffee shop downtown that made fantastic croissants, and Ryan always treated himself there after a job gone right. He had been wary, giving away one of his haunts, but Geoff and Jack apparently knew the place too.

“I didn’t,” Ryan replied, leaning back in his chair. He hadn’t worn the bandana, and he felt bare, exposed, even though these two had seen his face already. “People call me the Vagabond.”

He could feel Jack’s gaze on him, eyeing up the jeans with rips in the knees, the hoodie that was quickly becoming tattered, the shirt with the patched bullet hole in the shoulder.

“Where’d you get so good with technology, Vagabond?” Jack asked, her voice curling around his name like it was a joke.

Ryan shrugged. “I read a lot.”

In truth, he had gone to college for a couple years, before he had learned how much fun it was to take anything that wasn’t nailed to the floor. He’d been a smart kid, made for big things, but he didn’t regret not becoming some stuffy asshole with an office job and a tech degree.

“How well do you know your way around a gun?” Geoff asked, rolling his eyes at Ryan’s answer.

“I grew up in Georgia,” Ryan said, feeling safe in giving out that truth. Georgia was a big state. They weren’t going to find his name that way. “And I live in _Los Santos_. What do you think?”

“Okay, that question was dumb as dicks,” Ramsey said. “I’ll give you that.”

“I’m decent with handguns,” Ryan said, relenting. “Shotguns, too, though they’re not as useful in my line of work. Anything heavier I don’t have much experience with.”

Ramsey nodded. “Makes sense, I guess. We’ll get you up to speed on all that, though that won’t be your main job. You’ll mostly be tech assistance when we pick up more serious jobs. Security, cameras, security systems, techie shit like that. You won’t be on-site.”

Ryan nodded. That he could do. “I take it we won’t be robbing convenience stores for long, then?”

Ramsey grinned widely. “No, no we won’t.”

\--

Working with Ramsey was—well, it was a hell of a lot more fun than Ryan had been expecting. Neither of them treated him like they were holding a grudge for breaking into Pattillo’s apartment. It was easy to slip into friendship with them, to look at Ramsey less as his boss and more as a guy who he went out to the occasional bar with.

He didn’t entirely trust them, though. He couldn’t afford to, not with his line of work, and he kept his name a secret for as long as he could.

Ryan learned that the Fake AH Crew wasn’t just Geoff and Jack (and now himself). He met Kerry, who worked behind the scenes like Ryan. Kerry never made it obvious what exactly he did for Ramsey, but Ryan was pretty sure that he was involved in the drugs that passed through Ramsey’s hands. Ramsey had his fingers in a whole lot of pies for such a small operation. Ryan had to wonder how they were sustaining themselves.

\--

He got his answer a week later.

“So, heist!” Ramsey said when Ryan picked up his cell phone at nine am. He had already been up for hours, and was wide awake from too much coffee and too much nicotine. “Come to my place this afternoon, we have a job to plan.”

When Ryan showed up to Geoff’s cramped apartment, two men he had never seen were leaving. They smiled politely at him, but something about the way they carried themselves—with no small amount of authority—made him uneasy. He nodded to them and closed the door to Geoff’s apartment behind him as fast as he could.

“So who were they?” Ryan asked Geoff, who was sitting on his ratty couch with a beer in his hand. Ryan could hear Jack’s voice coming from another room.

Geoff shrugged and gestured at the papers spread out on the coffee table in front of him. “Old friends,” he said. “They’re going to make sure the LSPD doesn’t give us too awful much trouble. come on, let me show you what I have planned.”

Dirty cops, huh. Ryan sat down in a chair opposite Geoff. It took him a moment to figure out what exactly he was looking at, and then he grinned.

“We’re going to hit a jewelry store?” Ryan asked, pulling a blueprint close so he could study it more closely. A frisson of excitement shivered up his spine at the thought of pulling this off.

“We’re going to hit a jewelry store,” Geoff said, a slow smile spreading across his face.

\--

The jewelry store job went off without a hitch. Ryan parked himself in a van across the street, disabling the security systems remotely and directing Jack through those he couldn’t. They pulled the job off late at night, not that Los Santos ever really slept. There were still plenty of people about, some of whom had to have caught on to what was going on inside the store, but no cops ever showed up. Geoff didn’t even have to fire his gun, except for when he got annoyed at a lock and shot it to pieces.

Over the next few weeks they sold the jewelry to various sketchy pawn shops and seedy people in the county, Jack making day trips as far as San Fierro to sell some of the more recognizable pieces. Ryan ended up with a small stack of cash and a couple gold rings that Geoff had given him as they drove away from the store. It should have been harder than that, but Ryan wasn’t complaining, not at all.

\--

Geoff never talked to Ryan about it direct, but Ryan got good at knowing when the crew was starting to run low on funds. Jack’s voice would get sharp and harsh when she talked to Geoff or when she directed her anger at faceless cronies on the other end of phone calls. Geoff would start to get this look around his eyes—not desperation, not exactly, but a kind of nervousness that Ryan was starting to know well.

“Here,” Ryan murmured, sliding a mug of coffee toward Kerry. It was after midnight and they were both camped out in what Geoff called his headquarters—the spare bedroom in his apartment—going through the books. Geoff couldn’t be assed to do it himself half the time, and Ryan had a good head for numbers and more than enough spare time. There was a surprising amount of paperwork involved with being in a gang; had to make sure nobody was cheating you, after all.

“Thanks, man,” Kerry said, eagerly grabbing the mug. He was young, definitely still a kid. He probably couldn’t even legally buy cigarettes yet. It made Ryan a little nervous, that he was the guy that helped keep things running, but Geoff seemed to trust him to get the job done.

\--

“Walk with me, Vagabond,” Geoff said with a grin, pulling Ryan away from his cigarette break. Ryan stubbed out his cigarette, pulled up his bandana, and followed Geoff down to the apartment complex’s parking.

“We going somewhere?” Ryan asked, and Geoff hummed in confirmation but didn’t say anything else until they were on the road.

“I know when I hired you I said you wouldn’t be on-site,” Geoff started, and Ryan narrowed his eyes at Geoff. He didn’t like the sound of that. “But the situation has changed. I need to send a message to some people, and to do it I need you with me.”

“Okay,” Ryan said, because he knew that tone of voice well. Geoff and his little crew weren’t anywhere near the top of the food chain in Los Santos, but Ryan knew how desperately Geoff wanted to be apex predator. Ryan was going to help with that goal, because the money was good and the sense of security was even better. It had been a relatively easy job until now. “So where are we going now?”

“I’m going to teach you how to shoot a rifle,” Geoff said as they pulled in to Ammunation.

\--

The less said about that first shooting lesson, the better. Ryan hadn’t expected the weight of the guns that Geoff handed him, and he was going to be bruised for _days_ from the kick. But by the end of several grueling hours, Ryan could hit the target with an AK-47 and his arms were only shaking a little.

Geoff would never let him live down how bad he had been at first, though. No matter what Geoff claimed, Ryan had _not_ nearly shot himself in the foot.

\--

The bank robbery was going to be nothing like the jewelry store job, Ryan knew. Besides the fact that he was going to be in the thick of things alongside Geoff and Jack, there would be no stopping the cops from showing up, since they had planned the robbery for the middle of the day. Maximum chaos, maximum coverage, Geoff had said. Ryan knew they were doing this to get their names in the news.

The night before, Ryan stayed in Geoff’s apartment, on the cot in the spare room. He didn’t sleep—couldn’t on the best of nights, and this wasn’t the best of nights—and eventually he found himself sitting on the couch in the living room, staring at the mask Geoff had handed him.

“It’ll keep your face hidden better than that bandana,” Geoff had said when he handed Ryan the mask. “Plus it’s creepy as fuck. Fits your personality.” Ryan had no idea where Geoff had found it, but it looked and felt new. He stared at the skull for a few moments, smiling a little. He was nervous about this job, but he couldn’t deny the excitement at getting into the thick of things. It felt like stepping up in the world.

Geoff wandered into the living room a little later and sat down when he spotted Ryan. “Hey, Vagabond,” he murmured. “Excited for tomorrow?”

Ryan shrugged and made a split-second decision. “My name is Ryan. Ryan Haywood. Thought you should know.” _Just in case we fuck up tomorrow_ , he didn’t say, but Geoff seemed to understand anyway.

“Ryan Ryan Haywood,” Geoff repeated with a smirk. “Nice to meet you.”

\--

Ryan wished that the bank robbery had been as easy as the jewelry store.

Geoff and Ryan left Jack idling at the curb and headed into the bank. It was a small place, out in a small town in the county, but like Geoff said: he wanted to send a message. Geoff was going to take this whole goddamned state, and Ryan couldn’t wait.

Ryan had a knife in his pocket and a pistol in his hand, but with any luck he wouldn’t have to use either. His job would be to get a select few lockboxes open while Geoff convinced the tellers to hand over the cash.

Someone made a noise when they saw Ryan’s mask, and he grinned underneath the plastic. Showtime.

Geoff raised his gun, barrel pointed at the ceiling. “Everybody stay calm,” he shouted. Ryan headed toward the lockboxes. Nobody tried to stop him. They didn’t even have a guard in the place. Next time they would know better. “Get down on the floor and stay there,” Geoff continued. “Nobody has to get hurt today.”

Ryan looked behind him at the sound of shuffling. There were four or five customers-turned-hostages in the place, and two tellers. Geoff had his gun pointed at the younger of the tellers, talking low and quiet to her. Ryan had the first of the lockboxes open, and he dumped the contents into his bag without going through it. One down, one to go.

“Everybody is doing great,” Geoff was saying to their hostages. “Keep doing great, and you’ll all make it out of here unharmed.”

Ryan glanced out to the main floor of the bank when he heard an anomalous noise. He had always trusted his instincts. One of the hostages, a middle-aged guy in a jacket and a baseball cap, was fairly close to Ryan. The rustle of fabric that Ryan had heard was the man pulling a handgun out of his jacket.

Ryan’s breath caught. The man had the gun pointed at the back of Geoff’s head, and Geoff couldn’t hear the safety come off over the sound of his own shouting, and—

The pistol cracked, echoing through the bank, and the man slumped over. Ryan met Geoff’s wide-eyed stare.

“Nobody else has to die!” Geoff shouted to the other hostages. Someone screamed when they saw the blood pooling under the corpse. “He had to, but no one else does! Everybody stay calm!”

The cops would be on them soon, Ryan knew. He had timed how long it would take them to get from the local station to the bank, and they were running out of time. Shooting a hostage hadn’t been in the plans for today.

He pushed everything else out of his mind and concentrated on getting the last lockbox open. He kept his hands steady and refused to think about how he had just murdered a man.

They got out of there as soon as they could, and Jack peeled away from the curb before Ryan even had his door closed. He could hear the approaching sirens over the sound of the revving motor.

His hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and he couldn’t meet Geoff’s gaze. A quick in and out, that was what Geoff had promised. Nobody was going to die. And Ryan had fucked that up. Ryan had screwed over the job.

By the time they lost the cops and made it back to the apartment, Ryan had worked himself into a state of artificial calm. He knew everything was about to go to shit, but there wasn’t anything he could do now to prevent it.

He spent a long time in the bathroom, scrubbing at his hands even though of course there was no blood on them. He had been too far away to have any evidence left on him, and he had been wearing thick leather gloves anyway, but his hands still felt dirty.

Soon enough, though, he knew he had to go face the music. Let Geoff rip him a new one for almost fucking up a job, for going off-script, for _killing a civilian_. He pulled the mask off when he left the bathroom, and immediately his face felt bare and too exposed.

He wasn’t sure what, exactly, he was expecting from Geoff—a harsh reprimand, a gun in his face or at his back—but what he wasn’t expecting was Geoff pushing a glass of whiskey into his hand with a smile.

“Thought you’d fallen in in there,” Geoff said, nodding vaguely toward the bathroom door, and Ryan cracked an uneasy smile. “Time to celebrate a successful heist.”

“And by that Geoff means ‘get incredibly drunk,’” Jack said dryly. She laid a hand on Ryan’s shoulder, her gaze studying his face for a moment, and he worked not to flinch away. Then, more seriously, she said, “That was a good shot, Ryan.”

“Thanks?” Ryan took a quick drink of the whiskey and let it burn his throat.

“Good as dicks, dude,” Geoff said. There was no recrimination in his tone. “If you hadn’t shot that guy, I’d be dead.”

“I—okay,” Ryan said, smiling a little more easily. Geoff’s words didn’t help the knot in the pit of his stomach, but his whiskey did.

“He was innocent, though,” Ryan said to Jack later, when they were both getting to be drunk (Geoff was already well on his way to smashed). “I mean, the man I shot.”

Jack smiled and downed the rest of her drink. “You learn something fast in this business,” she said, with the seriousness of somebody who was concentrating heavily on her words so they didn’t come out slurred. “No such thing as an innocent person in Los Santos.”

\--

It wasn’t that he felt particularly guilty about the man’s death—and maybe that was what bothered him the most, that he wasn’t upset about the death itself.

Geoff’s praise had assuaged his guilt, and Ryan didn’t know what that said about him as a human being.

But it was easier, the next time, when Geoff dragged him out on a deal that went unexpectedly sour and they had to shoot their way out. It was easier to shoot people who were trying to shoot him too.

Later that night, though, when he was back in his own apartment, staring at the dark ceiling, he was struck with a sudden fit of paranoia. He had worn his bandana, but how well did that really protect him? He turned on enough lights to dig out the skull mask, and he stared at it for a long time, weighing it in his hands.

Ryan Haywood was a college dropout from Georgia who had disappeared off the map.

The Vagabond was a burglar, a thief, and a damn good one.

But the man in the skull mask, he was a killer.

\--

It was even easier, in the mask. When he wore the mask he wasn’t Ryan, or the Vagabond, he was Geoff Ramsey’s Skull. The Skull didn’t flinch when he killed, and he grinned at the chaos he caused.

\--

The first time they heard the rumors, Geoff about pissed himself laughing.

Word traveled in a city like Los Santos, and by now everybody had heard of the weirdo in the skull mask who showed up one day out of nowhere at Geoff Ramsey’s left hand. Ryan honestly hadn’t expected people to take the idea and run with it, though.

According to the rumors, the reason The Skull didn’t have a face was because he was on the FBI’s Most Wanted. He was a fucking psycho. He had killed more than the population of some small towns. And he fucking laughed when he killed, because he enjoyed it. People in this city had big imaginations and too much time on their hands.

“What, do I drink the blood of children, too?” Ryan asked.

“Maybe you should lay off the carnage a little bit next time,” Jack said mildly over the sounds of Geoff laughing himself sick. “Just a little bit?”

Ryan laughed and nodded. He wasn’t some sick fuck, he didn’t enjoy it like the rumors said he did—he didn’t get off on the murder and carnage (the mayhem, maybe, but not the death) —but he hadn’t exactly had lots of strong opinions about going after gang members with a knife and a machine gun last week.

“Sure thing, boss,” he said to her, and she grinned.

Rumors died down a little after that, and Ryan was careful not to attract too much attention to himself during jobs. Meant fewer explosions, but it also meant fewer bloodstains to wash out of his clothes.

\--

Ryan watched in horror as Geoff went down, blood gushing from where he had his fingers clamped over his shoulder, face contorted in pain.

“Keep shooting!” Geoff said, voice strained, and Ryan turned back to aim at the two remaining gangsters. His aim was off, though, and his body was shaking because Geoff was making pained noises behind him and nobody had ever gotten _shot_ when he was still robbing houses. He had not signed up for this shit.

Somehow he managed to take down the two gangsters, peppering their bodies with bullets until they finally went down, bleeding out. He turned back to Geoff. 

That was a lot of blood.

“Help me up,” Geoff said, and then, “Gently, you son of a bitch,” when Ryan wasn’t careful enough, hands still shaky with adrenaline and fear.

They made it back to the car that Jack had idling outside the warehouse, and her face paled a little when she saw them.

“Help me get him in the backseat,” she said as she got out of the driver’s seat, and the two of them managed to ease Geoff into the car with minimal grumbling and groaning from Geoff. Jack dug around in the backseat for a second before pulling out a first-aid kit. She pressed gauze against the wound, instructed Ryan to make sure he kept pressure on it during the ride, and jumped back in the car.

Geoff swore at every bump in the road, cursed at Jack for going so fast and also not fast enough, and all the while his face was getting paler and more drawn. Ryan had never had to deal with someone who had been shot before—not anything serious, at least; a couple grazes here, a couple clips there, but nothing like this—and it was a little scary, to be honest. The thought that a single bullet could just _take out_ Geoff Ramsey was terrifying.

When Jack pulled into the garage under Geoff’s apartment Ryan let his shoulders slump a little in relief, just for a second, before he helped Jack pull Geoff from the car. Geoff bitched Jack out the entire way up to his place, voice thready but annoyance still obvious, until Jack pushed Geoff to sit down on the lid of the toilet in Geoff’s expansive bathroom.

Ryan stood in the corner and watched Jack patch Geoff up with what looked like long-practiced familiarity. It looked kind of domestic, really, except for the blood slicking Jack’s hands and Geoff’s shoulder. 

He wasn’t being helpful—and he was probably getting in the way, actually—but he couldn’t help but hang around to watch Jack dig the bullet out after giving Geoff only the barest amount of pain relief.

“It isn't as bad or as deep as it could have been. Didn't even break a bone. You were pretty lucky, Geoff,” Jack murmured, and kept talking low and soft like that even though it didn’t look like Geoff was listening. It grounded Ryan a little, though, and his hands had finally stopped shaking inside his pockets.

\--

Somewhere along the way Ryan realized he trusted the other two. Not completely, maybe, but he trusted them to have his back in a fight and he trusted them not to fuck him over during a job. It wasn’t something he had expected when he had made the decision to join a crew.

And even though he trusted them, he wore the mask around them. “I’m breaking it in,” Ryan had said with a grin the first time he had been questioned about its presence in Geoff’s apartment, but that wasn’t true. Ryan trusted them, but to be the man that they needed him to be, he needed the mask.

So he began to wear it around the apartment, except when they were eating (and then he just stopped having meals with them). He wore it out on every single job. He wore it when the three of them hung out around the city. And one day, Ryan looked at the calendar and realized it had been nearly a year since the crew had seen his face.

\--

Geoff was a good man, and a better boss. He was likely the main reason why Ryan wasn’t rotting in jail for B&E or dead in a ditch somewhere after stealing from the wrong person. So, yeah, Ryan had a soft spot for the guy. And nobody talked shit about his boss.

He was in a shitty bar when he heard it. Two guys a couple tables away were talking—too loudly, Ryan thought with a small amount of scorn, for the topic of conversation—and he perked up when he heard the name _Ramsey_. Ryan listened in more closely after that, and within a couple seconds he had decided on his plan of action.

He locked himself into the—frankly disgusting—bathroom and pulled the mask from his bag. As he slipped in on, he grinned to himself. 

He kept his head low as he walked back out, and the haze and darkness of the place kept his cover safe as he made his way to the men he had been eavesdropping on.

They were still at their table, and hadn’t noticed Ryan. Good.

He sat down between them, startling a yelp from one, and slung his arms around their shoulders. “Boys,” he said, watching them both pale. Oh, he could get used to that.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [ryanthepowerbottomguy](http://ryanthepowerbottomguy.tumblr.com) over on tumblr! come say hi! (I also have a lot of tumblr-exclusive writing over there)


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